Question
Hi
Hope you can help. When I was 16 (now 36)I worked in a brewery and used to wash out the beer barrels, after a short period of time I started to experience back pain that made my buttocks ache and cause pain to shoot into my legs.  After two months I left that job and worked in engineering.  The back pain remained with me for a further 5 years.  It was usually agrovated through driving and sleeping in beds other than my own (i.e hotel beds).  Then about 8 years ago I was carring a roll of light corricated cardboard up some steps when my lower, left back muscle locked.  I could not move and experienced extream pain.  It got so bad that when I tried to get out of bed in the morning a extream splitting pain would happen and make me scream with pain (very, very painful).  My doctor game me pain killers and anti inflamtories.  I also found it painful to walk, just putting my right foot forward would be difficult.  After about 3 weeks it got better and I returned to work.  The problem is that on frequant occasions this keeps happening (about 2 to 3 times a year) it can happen for no reason, just standing or walking can bring it on.  It starts with a pain at the base of my spine, then after a few days my muscle (lower back) will go into spasm and I cant move.  If take ibuprofen straight away I can just about walk after 2 hours but the back pain will last for about four weeks.  Could you please advise me to what this is and what is causing it.

Many thanks
Tony (United Kingdom)

Answer
Tony,

Sounds like you are muscle-bound in your back.  You need to reset the resting tonus of those muscles to within the normal range -- a prospect involving a specific kind of self-training.

Please see the articles on back pain at somatics.com/page4.htm.  Make note of your options for correction of the problem at the bottom of the page, and try out the exercise given in one of the articles; it's a start that will probably help.

In retrospect, I would guess that your job washing out beer barrels involved a lot of leaning over, which would gradually condition your back muscles to a higher state of tension.